Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage. It’s defined by dictionary.com as “any long journey, especially one undertaken as a quest or for a votive purpose, as to pay homage”.

I suppose that’s as good a word as any. To pay homage. That’s why I’m doing this. It feels a little creepy and maybe somehow gratuitous to take a tragedy that didn’t really involve me and then somehow make it about me. I get that. Know that I feel as uncomfortable about it as you think I should. It’s just that in my life there have only been a few of those touchstone moments, those moments when you can look at it in the very instant it is happening and realize that you are changing that very second.

A bit of background: My work currently involves me traveling to a location and working 20 days straight with only one day off. During those single days off, it’s common place to either explore the area I’ve been living in and not seeing due to work,  or maybe sometimes just find a spot to take a breath after working non-stop.

My current rotation has me in Denver, a city that should spring to mind visions of breweries, outdoor activities, snow-capped mountains in June, and any number of restorative activities to help me re-center after working through a couple of weeks. However, it only took about 24 hours of being here before I knew my day off wouldn’t be hiking, brewery hopping, or even just a drive through the mountains. It would be the pilgrimage.

It wasn’t long after I got here that I started moving around Google maps to sort of place where I am in the city and saw that word. Littleton. The mental Rolodex set to work trying to remember why that name stood out. About a second later it settled: Columbine.

I realize that countless words have been written about that particular event, words that are far more meaningful, far more insightful, far more helpful, if that’s even a thing. But, I know that on that day, I was changed.

Sure, there’d been school shootings before this, even one just across the state. But this was different. Maybe it was the magnitude. Maybe it was the media coverage. Maybe it was that I was already going through my own college freshmen depression. But I remember seeing the news and it took my breath. I cried all day.

Yes. I did mourn the victims. All of them. I cried for lost innocence. I cried because I realized that my generation would never know of a world with a safe place. We would be the first to come of age when metal detectors and lockdown drills were commonplace, where the pop of a light bulb going out induces a moment of panic.

I cried, because I knew that without the strength a couple close friends had given me, without the grace of whatever God there might be, it could have been me.

I’m hesitant to write another story about a gay boy being bullied. I’m actually kind of irritated with the word “bully”. It sounds so playground in a parking lot world. So, I’ll exercise some brevity to just say that once we moved to a new town when I was in sixth grade, until the day I left that town for college, my life was hell. A home life that certainly needed some psychological intervention was made worse by a school life that daily told me I was worthless and weak, with a constant threat of violence. To say that I didn’t often think of turning the tables would be a lie.

We’ll never know what was going through their minds on the day two boys did the unthinkable. But on the day they did it, I broke.

I’ve never said it out loud before, but I felt bad for them.

No. Their actions are not excusable.

Yes. Their victims are the victims.

But, I guess to make tragedy make sense, we all process it through our own experience, and it’s what I admittedly assume is their hurt I can relate to. I can still feel. I can still be back to it with a quick memory. I can still feel that flash of terror when passing a certain boy, even now with us both grown men, as I walk through Kroger with my mom. That day back in 1999, I realized what that pent up hurt and pain can do. While watching news footage from my dorm room floor, I realized what living with hurts that deep can do and knew I had to find a way to get it out of me.  I dove deeper into writing, forcing myself to journal to get out what was inside. I also stopped watching anything that depicts violence.

The connection I made to Columbine compels me towards it when it’s a 10 minute drive away. And so, I set the GPS on my phone and point the rental car that direction.

***

I’m afraid there’s no pathos here. I went. I couldn’t bring myself to even turn onto the actual grounds of the school, let alone get out of the car. This sort of tragedy tourism I’d embarked on didn’t feel right. But in driving past the school, I can say I’m almost certain the sign out front is the same sign I remember seeing from news footage.

I turned the car around in the neighborhood next to the school and was surprised to see couples out for an evening walk, a boy and his dog playing fetch in a front yard. On the other side of the school is a park where a group had set up a grill and was playing volleyball. The day’s Little League games were wrapping up. It was so normal. People had moved on.

And that’s exactly as it should be. Life does go on. It may not seem like it, but I’ve moved on. You mark the hurt and the way it changed you, then try to move through the world as best you can. But you make the pilgrimage for the same reason people go to Ground Zero or Gettysburg. You go to not only pay homage to what happened there, to the victims, but to whatever it is you’ve found in yourself there. I’ve made the pilgrimage. I have no desire to go back.